Christine Toomey – författare

'In the wake of the strongest earthquake in Italy for nearly forty years and the many aftershocks that followed, Italians began speaking of the earth beneath our feet as la terra ballerina, the dancing earth. The dance they spoke of was unrelenting.'Foreign correspondent Christine Toomey spent years renovating her glorious, long-abandoned hill-top home in Le Marche, Italy, as a haven of rest from covering crises around the world. But in 2016, the peace and beauty of this beloved landscape were thrown into chaos when a series of powerful earthquakes struck the heart of the Apennines.Wracked with grief for a place still reverberating with seismic aftershocks, Christine decided that one way of preserving the community was to tell its history.Fuelled by the artefacts uncovered in her attic - including oil paintings and lithographs, a map, thick with dust but showing details of the earthquake that obliterated Messina in 1908, and century-old letters belonging to the enigmatic priest who had occupied her house a century earlier - Christine set out on a journey to tell the story of the earthquakes that devastated the region.The result is a heartfelt, insightful and life-affirming story about the places that make us, and the life-changing thunderbolts that can come at all of us, at any time, from any quarter.

In 2011, Christine Toomey met an unforgettable group of Tibetan Buddhist nuns. After hearing their stories—of prison, extreme hardship, and ultimately fleeing across the Himalayas into exile—she resolved to learn more about the private, courageous women of Buddhism: who they are, their experience of suffering, what motivates them to seek enlightenment, and what stands in their way. Toomey’s quest took on even greater urgency with the sudden deaths of her father and then her mother, and her own search for healing wisdom in the aftermath of loss.In Search of Buddha’s Daughters introduces us to women from around the world—Nepal, India, Burma, and Japan, as well as the US, the UK, and France—who have come to the ordained life from every faith and career: a former policewoman, a princess, a Bollywood star, and a concert violinist. Toomey meets a Harvard graduate who sometimes breaks into hip-hop moves after meditating, a Japanese nun who has written bestselling erotica, and a Nepalese order of nuns who practice kung fu for spiritual and physical empowerment.Through insightful conversations with over thirty women, Toomey investigates Buddhism as an antidote to the problems of life in the twenty-first century, and considers the status of women today—worldwide, and within one of our oldest wisdom traditions. “In a world numbed by the amount of attention paid to violence, terrorism, and political and religious power struggles,” she writes, “I find it profoundly refreshing to come across women whose lives are dedicated to nurturing the opposite.”

"Seamlessly narrated, this book reveals the varied paths available to women seeking to dedicate their lives to Buddhist practice" (Buddhadharma).They come to the monastic Buddhist life from every faith and career: a policewoman, a princess, a Bollywood star, a violinist. Out of the public eye, despite hardship and even persecution, they vow to seek enlightenment in a world full of noise.Who are these women? What motivates them, and what stands in their way? Award-winning journalist Christine Toomey "travels around the world staying with nuns from Burma to California, drawing the reader inside their unexpectedly fascinating lives" (Mara Hvistendahl, The Wall Street Journal). She encounters unforgettable nuns who reveal the blessings—and perils—of carrying a twenty-year tradition into the twenty-first century. Often denied equal status with monks, they are nonetheless devoted—to their faith, and to change."[An] ambitious and thoughtful book . . . Toomey paints vivid portraits of women who are emboldened in the face of gender discrimination." —Tricycle"Openness may explain why In Search of Buddha''s Daughters is so much more than a sum of its parts. With a rich and compelling narrative voice, it is a text with the power to inspire a new perspective on how to live, how to view those around us, and how to find deep and lasting happiness in what we already possess." —Financial Times

A brief meeting with a Buddhist nun in India made a deep impression on Christine Toomey. It sent her on a two-year, 60,000-mile odyssey to learn more about the contemporary women choosing in their thousands to become part of a long tradition of female spirituality that stretches back through the centuries and now embraces the radical possibility that the next Dalai Lama could be female.In The Saffron Road, Toomey follows in the footsteps of earlier generations of Buddhist nuns to trace the routes by which the philosophy has spread from a solitary order in a remote area of India in the 5th century BC, via 1950s San Francisco where Zen was popularised by the Beat generation, to the globally-renowned practitioners of mindfulness of today. Beginning her journey in the Himalayas, close to the birthplace of the Buddha, Toomey travels from Nepal, to India, through Burma, Japan and on to North America and Europe, along the way visiting contemporary nunneries to meet the women who practise there. Amongst those she talks to are a group of "kung fu" nuns, an acclaimed novelist, a princess, a concert violinist, a former BBC journalist, and a one-time Washington political aide. Through these conversations, the daily reality of the Buddhist existence is gradually revealed, together with the diverse spiritual paths leading these women towards nirvana.Combining travelogue, history, interviews and personal reflection, The Saffron Road opens the door to a rarely glimpsed world of ritual, discipline and enlightenment.

A memoir set in rural Italy, and a journey through history about a series of earthquakes that devastated the region